Stalked
by hellothereeveryone
Summary: A frightening presence in their footsteps brings Molly and Sherlock closer together. My first fanfiction! Hi!
1. Stalling

Molly tried to stop Robert at the building door. She really did. The man, taller than her and brutishly muscled, as she would expect of a construction worker, thumped against her outstretched hand and glanced down at her in mild surprise. He blinked, dull brown eyes slow to realize what she meant by the gesture.

"But I thought we had a nice date," he mumbled, frowning, confused. His Scottish accent was thick; he rubbed his scruffy chestnut beard and scratched his balding head. Sighing, she pressed her hand to his chest, pushing him gently back as she made her way up the steps to the door. Their date was actually one of the nicer ones on which she had been; he was a sweet guy, surprisingly chivalrous, and intelligent for a construction worker. Not that construction workers weren't intelligent, but he had the mind better suited for a lawyer or even a doctor than a man in manual labor, sophisticated and keen. Unfortunately, she had seen better, and even if Robert had lived up to her unreal expectations, he still couldn't come up to her flat. She imagined he wouldn't be very pleased with what he found there.

Molly reached behind her for the doorknob, trying to think quickly to get her out of what would rapidly become an awkward situation if it continued. "We did," she said perkily, "And I would love to go out with you again. But you just… can't come up. My flat's a complete mess." That was entirely true. When she had left, _someone_ had discarded a half dissected frog on her coffee table.

Robert didn't seem to want to take no for an answer. He reached past her, nudging her out of the way. Of course, strength was relative; she stumbled out of the way, her feet twisting in her heels.

He held the door open for her. "After you."

She swallowed her anxiety and started up the stairs. _Talk fast_, she told herself. "You really should stay down here. It's such a mess."

"I won't stay if you don't want me to," he promised, grinning boyishly. He did want to, that was plain. Sherlock would be proud. She bit her lip, drawing in a shaky breath. He couldn't even open the _door_.

"Look," she said, stopping at the top of the stairs, turning and holding out both hands this time, suppliantly. "I had a great time and everything. But I'm just too embarrassed to… ruin… our date by having you see my flat. It's horrid."

But he had decided, apparently, to ignore her. "This one?" He pointed to the one she had her back to, the one she had stupidly chosen to stand guardedly in front of.

"Uh… yeah." She barred his way with one arm. "Robert—"

"Listen, Molly!" he cried, half laughing. "I don't care how dirty your flat is. I want to walk you to your door. Now," He leaned in to kiss her.

Every muscle in her body tensed. She opened her mouth to protest, made a small, strangled sound, just as his lips brushed across hers. She couldn't move. Frozen in shock, she stared up at him, too surprised to move backward, and shut her eyes tight, thinking that if she couldn't see it, then it wasn't happening, and she wasn't kissing a man who couldn't ever compare to the man who…was suddenly standing on the threshold of her apartment, black curls disheveled, elbows bent, hands curled inside his pockets.

Sherlock sighed as if it was a chore to insert his hand between them, startling Robert out of his sloppy kiss. He turned and found himself facing a man, tall and slender, whom Molly had been hiding in her flat. His eyes widened; his mouth gaped. Sherlock smiled mirthlessly at the vacant look in his eyes.

Molly shut her eyes even tighter and pressed her lips together, knowing what was coming. She couldn't imagine trying to stop him from what he was about to do; she knew that he would just turn on her instead. Better to let him unleash his wrath of logic on someone who would be merely flabbergasted rather than wounded, as she would be.

"And who are you?" Robert spat, disgusted. It was completely the wrong question to ask.

"You're a construction worker," began Sherlock, irritation flashing against the ice of his stormy eyes. "Divorced, depressed, and entirely ignorant of women, which might explain the divorce. When a woman says she doesn't want you to come up, I would deduce that the only possible explanation for it is that she _doesn't want you to come up_, and I would also suppose that she doesn't want you trying to kiss her." He glanced at Molly, giving her a once-over, and continued, "And she especially doesn't want you trying to kiss her the way you just did."

Robert's cheeks burned crimson. His fists balled at his sides. Sherlock's eyes darted to them, then back to his face. He smirked. "And I suppose you could do better?" Robert snarled.

Sherlock's smile broadened. He must have seen something in Robert's face that had inspired true spite, something that had escaped Molly, but suddenly it didn't matter because he took Molly's hand and pulled her to him, trapping her between the doorframe and his body. He pressed his mouth to hers and unleashed a flood of fire through her veins, a blaze that broke the dam of her heart and boiled her blood. Her face felt like it was on fire. Her lips parted; her fingers found the silk of his hair just as he pulled away. She gasped. He didn't notice. Robert had disappeared. Sherlock glanced down the stairs just in time to see him storm out of the building.

He led the way into her flat and flopped on the couch, where the television still glowed. "You were out late. Did you have a nice time?"


	2. Shock

"Is there something wrong with my face?"

Startled, Molly glanced up from the dishes. She blinked at the beautiful man whose long legs stretched out luxuriously on the coffee table before him, arms crossed over his chest as he watched—and thus criticized everything about—the telly. His dark curls were damp from a morning shower and one ringlet clung to his forehead endearingly.

Then he looked at her, blue eyes piercing as knifelike icicles. His face was expressionless and beautifully, angelically frozen. He drummed the fingers of his right hand slowly on the arm of the couch beside him, waiting for an answer. She was so mesmerized by the catlike gaze of his eyes that she fell, lost in them, until he cocked his head slightly, impatience wearing his temper quickly.

"Is there something," he repeated, voice deeper than before, "Wrong with my face?"

She jumped and sucked in a breath, confused. She had heard him the first time, but naturally one look into his eyes had obliterated her short term memory. She shook her head, red ponytail swinging behind her. "No. Not at all."

He looked away, eyes settling back on the flashing television screen with the same impenetrable calm he always maintained. She felt like she had been released from some sort of spell when he looked away from her. He made a small sound in his throat, an ambiguous, almost insignificant "hmm". At least, it would have been insignificant if anyone but Sherlock had made it.

She cleared her throat and set down the last clean plate on the counter. "Why… Why did you ask?"

As she had thought she would, she regretted asking instantly. "Because you keep glancing at me," said Sherlock, continuing to watch the telly and not looking at her. "I can feel you thinking. It's breaking in on my concentration. You have no idea how much effort it takes to point out everyone else's shortcomings. Especially on these soap operas. There are too many things to keep track of."

She should have been used to him by now, living with her in her flat. The man who criticized the organization of her own home while leaving out his experiments for the entire world to see—and smell. The man who cursed his own feelings and tore everyone else's to shreds. Sherlock Holmes. Maybe it would be easier not to look at him if he hadn't kissed her last night.

Molly's phone buzzed and she tugged it hurriedly from her pocket, glad to look away from him. She read the text three times before the shock of what was happening set in. Her brow furrowed and her lips parted in a small "O" of shock.

"I'm going to work," she murmured, reaching for her purse blindly as she continued to re-read the text. This was not happening. It couldn't be happening.

"You don't start work for another two hours," muttered Sherlock from the living room. Of course he had her schedule memorized. She might have been flattered under different circumstances.

"They need me now."

"Morning murder?"

Molly headed for the door, her hand reaching for the knob. She breathed in shakily and looked at him, still sitting, still gazing at the telly, locked in his own little world. "They found Robert dead last night."


	3. Shadows

It hadn't been the best of days for her, coming in early to do a post-mortem on the man she'd had a date with the previous night. While he hadn't been her dream man, Robert had been sweet and funny and perfectly courteous. If Sherlock hadn't been hiding in her flat, waiting for her to come home, she might have enjoyed letting Robert walk her to her door; she might have even enjoyed letting Robert kiss her. She definitely didn't enjoy finding him on her table this morning.

It hadn't helped that she felt completely incompetent not knowing what had killed him. It seemed that he had died from some sort of toxin, but she didn't understand why the killer had chosen that particular weapon, because they'd obviously had access to easier means. Both of Robert's knees had been broken, his shoulders dislocated, his fingers cracked. They were methodical injuries; he had been purposely wounded—tortured. There were no other injuries, no black eyes or bruises or bloody scratches to indicate a real fight. Someone had taken him, tortured him, and killed him; she didn't need to be a genius to figure that out. But she couldn't pinpoint the toxin that had killed him. Her feckless blundering about the lab throughout the morning, trying poison after poison, had left her hunched on a stool in the corner, head bent, hands over her face as she tried not to cry. Sherlock's words echoed over and over in her head: _"For the sake of law and order, I suggest you avoid all future attempts at a relationship, Molly"_.

Eventually she had summoned up the courage to put away Robert's body, resigning herself to defeat, and dragged out another. The rest of the cases were easy: strangled, fallen down stairs, some sickness or another that the doctors hadn't been able to ascertain while the person was living. Her movements were sluggish and heavy. Ten ton weights hung from her arms and the sky rested on her shoulders. By the end of the day, alone in the hospital, she could have fallen asleep on her lab table. She was sure the last corpse of the day, a pretty young woman with an angelic smile in death, would have made great company.

The lights flickered erratically. Molly sat up quickly, startling. Silence. She leaned forward, straining to hear something, anything, but picked up nothing except the buzz of the lights above her head. She relaxed and stood up from her chair, starting toward the body. She wouldn't be able to autopsy it tonight, not when she was this tired. She'd cut herself with her own scalpel.

Just as she touched the body bag the crash of metal being overturned and the shattering of glass made her yelp. She whipped around, jerking her head so fast that her neck hurt, looking for someone in the lab with her. The main doors were closed, as well as the auxiliary entrances. Her breathing quickened; she reached down to her tray of instruments, hand grasping blindly for something that could help her.

A shadow flashed behind a shelving unit.

The lights shut off completely.

She ran.

She lunged through the doors just as shadowy fingers grazed the back of her shirt. She wrenched herself forward, screaming. She took the corner so fast that she skidded; her heart skipped a beat and she righted herself just before she fell. Molly flew out of the doors and kept running down the street. Relief swept over her when she saw her car, but then she realized that she'd taken a scalpel instead of her purse.

She flagged down a cab on the corner, terrified of stopping for even a moment. Some people walking down the street glanced at her quizzically, the woman in a lab apron with a surgery tool trapped in her vise-like hand. She hardly noticed them and glanced down the street instead, looking for her pursuer. Whoever had been in the lab with her seemed to have vanished, but the wraith-like presence of someone following her remained strong. Someone across the street from her watched her a little too closely. The alley behind her was too quiet. The shadows were too loud.

When the cab pulled up alongside her building she did something she had never done before: she leapt out without paying. She tuned out his obscene shouting and ran up the stairs. She banged on her door for thirty seconds too long and broke down in tears when Sherlock opened it.

She wasted no time falling into his startled arms. Sobs shook her fragile shoulders as she buried her face against his chest. He seemed too confused to protest or push her away or point out one of her flaws as a human being. He shut the door and enclosed her in his arms, saying nothing. She could feel his eyes burning her soul, searching for an answer to his unspoken question: _"What the hell happened now?"_


	4. Hushed

He waited until Molly had fallen asleep in her bed, sheets pulled so tightly around her that he was surprised she didn't suffocate. It wasn't cold that night, but he imagined she thought she was protecting herself from whatever stalkers she'd managed to attract now. Of course, there was no way she'd be able to fend off a "wraith" (as she'd described it) that killed by poison and tortured as systematically as Sherlock would have thought to torture someone. From what she'd described to him, the poison used to kill her date, the way he'd been tormented and the sudden appearance of the intruder in her lab, Sherlock already had a couple ideas.

Once Molly's breathing settled into a deeper pattern than he normally heard from her, he donned a long black coat and let himself out, locking the door behind him. He took the spare key from under the mat with him. It was more to keep Molly's new friends out than to let himself back in. He could find a variety of creative ways to get inside her flat.

The streets were almost empty as he strode to St. Bart's. He could have taken a cab, but the brisk cool of the 2:00 A.M air electrified his blood, stimulated his mind. Not that he needed it.

He reached the hospital and found that the main entrance, or at least the one that Molly typically used, was still open. He walked around the perimeter of the building, touching every door, every handle, fiddling with every lock and knob he could find. When he returned to where he started he laughed softly and glanced straight up, admonishing himself. He backed up a few steps, just enough to see that a window not far above the door was still open a miniscule hairsbreadth.

"Moron," he muttered to himself, strolling through the open door and taking his first left up a flight of stairs into the room with the open window. It was an office, a small room that employed an unhappy desk worker, by the look of it. He either took no pride in his work or whoever had come in through the window had taken the time to scatter his papers on his desk. A curve of mud accidently left on the intruder's shoe had flaked off when he had vaulted through the window. Sherlock shut the window, irritated by the draft, and bent down to examine the mud. It was, without doubt, from a shoe, and he doubted it was from the shoe of whoever worked there. They were depressed, burdened by their work, and overweight. Sherlock wasn't going to imagine they spent much time reveling in the outdoors or getting their work shoes dirty.

He ambled to the lab next, hands in his pockets, whistling a merry tune. The main entrance from the hall was unlocked, as Molly had left it. He flicked on the lights and was greeted by a corpse in a half open body bag. Behind a shelving unit a metal stool and a cart piled with glass chemistry equipment had been overturned. The glass had broken into a thousand shards, covering the ground like clear, sharp snow.

But a man who could climb up a building and slip like a spider through a window, a man like a "wraith", wouldn't have accidently made such a racket. He couldn't have been trying to scare her out, either, because following her home, which he assumed was the point, would have been easier if he had simply waited, and melted into her shadow.

It took him only a moment to locate the cause of the intruder's distraction. Molly's purse lay on a table just beside the fallen equipment. Her phone lay beside it, still glowing with a newly received text message—incidentally, from Sherlock. He smirked, tossing her phone up into the air and catching it deftly. The gang—for he was certain by now that it was an organization, and not an individual—that was following her wasn't as centralized as he had thought before. If the man they had sent to stalk her startled at the mere buzzing of a phone behind him, they couldn't be as dangerous as Molly's tears had convinced him.

One of the side entrances to the lab was still open. He exited the room through there and found himself walking down an auxiliary hallway that appeared seldom used. It led outside. Sherlock paused, glancing up and down the street. To his left it ran into a bigger road, where cars flashed by every few seconds. To his right, however, it led into a deserted alley.

A man leaned against the wall in the alley, dressed in black and punching in a message on his phone. He seemed content to ignore Sherlock until he had stopped before him.

"Good morning, sir," Sherlock murmured, his breath steaming in the air. In the dim light cast by a far off streetlamp he could just discern the brown of mud on the man's shoes, the same color as the mud on the floor of the office in the hospital. The man wore gloves and a knife was concealed in the leg of his dark jeans. Very badly concealed.

The man glanced up, tucking away his phone. He seemed as though he didn't know whether to turn and leave or stay and talk or try and kill him, a stranger approaching him so early in the morning. He scowled. Sherlock could hear the fragile, slow clockwork of his mind ticking, and rolled his eyes.

"Nightshade, isn't it?" he asked, nodding to a sprig of the poisonous plant hanging from a string around the man's wrist. It was the oddest choice of accessory Sherlock had ever seen. He thought back to another case he'd seen long ago, when he'd put the head of a crime syndicate in jail without a second thought. What had his people been called? The Daisies? Tulips of Doom? No. Whatever they were called, they were stupid, letting him find one of their men. Especially one who had just threatened the life of one of his dearest friends. This man was here on purpose, waiting for him. He must have had some sort of useless message to deliver.

The man looked down asininely as if it was the first time he'd seen the _Atropa belladonna _clinging to his wrist. He held up his hand. "It's our tag," he said calmly. Sherlock sighed at the man's blissful ignorance of the hole he was digging himself into with every word. "Our names. Nightshade's mine."

"A deadly plant," mused Sherlock. Then he remembered. "Hemlock, wasn't it? That was the man's name. I put him in jail long ago. That wasn't his real name, of course, but your gang has an affinity for the use of herbal toxins as your weapons. The Garden of Death, you call yourselves. But why now? Why seek me out now?"

"A little bird told us you were defenseless. No where to run, no one to hide with except that little rat of a woman that works in the lab. I'm not sure how much good she'll do you."

Knowing that the little bird in question was a leftover bit of vermin from Moriarty's web, Sherlock grimaced. His upper lip curled in disgust while his dagger blue eyes narrowed in anger. "That 'rat', as you call her, is a better human being than any of you could ever hope to be." With a soft grunt he grabbed a fistful of the man's shirt and twisted it, jerking him forward. The man pushed against Sherlock's shoulders, struggling against him. Sherlock plucked a dark, round berry from the man's "tag" and slammed his head back against the wall. He pried his mouth open. He held the berry less than an inch away from his lips, ready to force it in at any moment.

"If any of you dare to breathe within a ten mile radius of her, I will come for you," whispered Sherlock in a low growl. "Your last meal will be a fistful of nightshade or hemlock or yew or what have you. And I'll be there, standing over you, watching you die. I'll be the last smiling face you ever see."


	5. Hunted

"Hemlock," Sherlock murmured in the morning when Molly stumbled sleepily from her room. She blinked at him, frowning as he poured a stream of steaming tea into two cups.

She flopped down on the couch. "That's not the sort of tea you usually make. If this is one of your experiments, leave me out of it." She had no intention of being poisoned that morning.

Setting one of the cups into her hands, he reached down and wrapped her fingers around it. Her hands were still numb and cold from what had happened the night before. "Thank you," she said.

"The tea is your cheap black blend. I meant hemlock, the poison. That's what was used to kill your date."

She shouldn't have been surprised. She should have handled the situation and the news calmly. Needless to say, it was early, she was still in shock from the night before, and she had told him a thousand times not to leave the house. She gaped at him. "You visited the hospital last night."

She meant to say it accusatorially, angrily, indignantly, but it came out flat, like a simple statement. Of course he wouldn't follow the rules. Of course he would go out investigating… someone who had been stalking her. She wasn't sure whether to be flattered or irritated or comforted. After thinking about it for a moment she decided it was better to be on Sherlock's good side, and let him do what he wanted. And if what he wanted was to protect her, well, she couldn't argue with that.

"Your friend entered through the window. He was good at hiding, but he was easily startled by your phone when it buzzed. He overturned a cart and a chair, and you fled. He tried to chase you to capture you, to use you as leverage against me. Unfortunately, you ran too fast for him to catch. I paid him a visit last night."

Molly sipped her tea. She shuddered when she realized how close she had come to being a hostage. "What do they want?"

"They're sore losers. A few years ago I put their boss in jail. They're a gang called the Garden of Death that uses poisons to kill. Each of them has their own 'tag' or nickname. Your stalker is 'Nightshade' while the man I helped incarcerate is known as 'Hemlock'. Their use of that particular poison on your date was deliberate. They're trying to use you to get to me. They caught your friend after he left the other night and tortured him for information about what he saw, some sort of weakness they could use to get in or find you, but you never let him in anyway."

"But how… how did they know about you living here?" Her eyes widened. "I told you that leaving the house was dangerous! Someone saw you!"

Sherlock shrugged. "Someone must have seen me when I was keeping an eye on John. One of Moriarty's leftover servants. They said someone had told them about me. Someone's selling the information of my existence."

He didn't seem as perturbed as he should have been in this situation. Molly's hands shook, threatening to spill her tea. "Someone very dangerous knows you're alive," she summarized tremulously, "And now a bitter gang is after _me_ so they can get to _you_?"

"You could tell yourself that, I suppose," he mused. "I'll just have to do a little hunting. You'd be surprised the amount of information one will divulge under the slightest pressure. The man I spoke to last night gave me a name. He shouldn't be too difficult to track down and take care of."

"Someone is _stalking_ me!"

He blinked. "I thought you'd be flattered. Someone's finally interested in getting close to you."

She winced. Her eyes fell to the still, light brown pool of tea in her cup. She fell silent as his words settled in her heart. She couldn't say why everything he said still stung. She should be used to it. She should be used to everything. But she never would understand how someone so beautiful could be so cruel. She never would understand how she could still love him after all that he had said.

There was a faint clink of glass on glass as Sherlock set down his cup. He leaned toward her and his dark curls fell forward, shading one blue-gray eye. He brushed it back and reached out with his free hand. She took it, but his skin was cold, his fingers icy. She didn't understand how someone could live so cold.

"I made it quite clear that there would be consequences if they touched you," said Sherlock. His thumb brushed the inside of her wrist and she shivered. His eyes were glued to her face, but she knew this trick of his. It was the same one animal trainers would use on their pets to keep them calm. He thought of her as nothing more. Her heart ached.

He nodded toward the window, still holding her hand. "Unfortunately they didn't seem to take me seriously. There's a man on a rooftop a quarter mile away watching this very room. Is there some sort of roadblock in those funny brains of yours that keeps you from understanding the most basic directives? It's a marvel you've all survived this long."

He began to stand, pulling her up with him. She barely had time to set down her tea and echo, "They're watching?" before he spun her around so his back was to the window and his arms were around her and his lips were at her ear, his breath warm on her skin.

"So they can't read my lips," he murmured softly. She tensed in his embrace. "Leave. Walk down the street and don't look back. Enter the most crowded public building you can find and wait for me there. Don't talk to anyone."

He pressed a kiss to her cheek, but it was too low and his lips scraped her jaw line. He walked her steadily backward to the door, his eyes never leaving her face. Her breathing went shallow as he reached behind her to open the door.

"Good luck," he whispered, and shut the door in front of her.


	6. Silence

The clothing store was packed as tightly as a can of sardines that day. The bright neon sign they had hung in their storefront to signal a massive sale had attracted what seemed like all of London. Molly squeezed in amongst them and took her place in the back, near the clearance racks with their mountains of rejected clothing. As ugly as the articles were, a few hopeful women still scoured them for some lost designer masterpiece. Molly had little trouble blending in, as she had practiced searching the clearance racks many times. Before, her eyes might have been tacked to the pathetic clothes as she looked for something decent; now, she glanced up every other second to see if anyone suspicious had followed her.

One of the women, short and chubby, bumped impatiently into her. "Excuse me," she snapped. Molly jumped out of her way, surprised, and fell into the arms of a man who had been waiting, invisible, behind her.

Her blood ran cold as his fingers curled around her upper arms. The skin of his hands was rough and callused. When she glanced down, she saw a string tied around his left wrist, attached to which was a sprig of some bright-flowered plant she couldn't identify but knew was likely poisonous.

"Don't scream," he muttered. He shifted her slightly to the right so she could feel the shape of a gun hidden in his coat. She sucked in a breath. "Walk in front of me. Go."

He steered her toward a door marked "employees only". With no one particularly watching and no security guards to whom she could signal, she reached out a trembling hand and opened the door to a metal staircase with dim, shabby lighting every few steps. He pushed her in and hooked the door closed behind them. By the minimal light she could just make out the red sign with an arrow that pointed up the stairs, with the word "roof" inscribed inside it.

"Walk," he ordered, pushing at the small of her back with one hand. With tears in her eyes she started forward, taking each step as slowly as she could; she was afraid that if she hurried, she would trip and fall.

They reached a door at the top of the stairway that she tried to open but couldn't, because it was locked. Her kidnapper gave an irritated grunt and shoved her to one side. He wiped his hands off on his jeans and kicked the door open with such strength that it almost came off its hinges. She whimpered as he grabbed her again and pushed her out onto the roof.

The gray morning light was too bright after her walk up the stairs. Molly blinked against the dim sun and turned, disoriented, to face the man who had brought her there. His face was sharp, defined, handsome, but his mouth had a cruel twist to it that made him the ugliest man she had ever seen. There was an evil in the way he looked at her, the way he stood, in the rumble of his voice and the glint of his dark eyes that repelled her.

"What do you want?" she managed to whisper, which was more than she had expected of herself. When Sherlock was in one of his moods, she was too frightened to protest any of his actions, but she supposed that was because of her respect for him. He might be cruel, as this man was, but there was good in his heart, as much as he denied having a heart in the first place. She didn't find herself as afraid of this man as she should have been; she couldn't respect a man who clearly had no soul, who had sold it to murder. She would stand up to him.

"We want your boyfriend," he said, then paused. He grinned coldly and amended, "We want his head on a platter. We want him to watch as he loses something precious to him, like we watched when he put Hemlock in prison."

More men had come up the stairs, rolling their necks and fingering their weapons: knives and guns and vials of clear liquids that she assumed were distilled from the deadliest plants on earth.

"Let's welcome him, shall we?"


	7. Shrill

Naturally, Sherlock knew what he would find when he stepped out of the stairwell onto the roof of the tacky clothing store. Molly would have run for _this_ store, in particular, because she would have known it would be crowded. She would have retreated to the corner, thinking it safest. She would have underestimated the preparedness of her stalkers, and not known that they would have been waiting for her there. Unable to get her out of the store without causing a scene, they would have taken her upstairs to the roof for dramatic effect, something they were particularly fond of—they went out of their way to use rare plant poisons instead of simpler guns to dispatch their targets. He knew that he would find her on the roof, but he also knew she wouldn't be attended to by just one man. No; they would think this a special occasion, and summon all of their upper-ranking soldiers to watch as the great Sherlock Holmes was tortured and killed as retribution for putting their leader behind bars.

A circle of twenty men stood there on the roof, dressed all in black. Each one was armed. One of them, with oleander tied to his wrist, stood in the center, gripping Molly by the arms. Her lips trembled, but she held her head high, her eyes meeting his with no vestige of terror.

"Welcome, Mr. Holmes," said the man. He gave Molly a shake by the shoulders and she wrenched against his grip. "Here to save your girlfriend?"

Sherlock leveled his gaze at the man and couldn't help the twitch of a smile at his lips. The man's face grew grave at the realization of Sherlock's levity. Sherlock looked at the rest of the men, each with a poisonous plant attached to their wrists, each armed with a gun or a knife or some vial of plant toxin. The gun inside Sherlock's coat would be useless against all of them. One of them would shoot Molly before he could blink.

Unfortunately, hostages were all too easy to procure.

"Oleander," said Sherlock, smiling. "It is Oleander, isn't it? The rising star of the Garden of Death after Hemlock's incarceration. You made quite a name for yourself, and quite quickly, too. By popular demand you were installed as the next boss. Educated at Oxford in biochemistry. You knew your way around poisons better than anyone, didn't you? The Garden of Death offered you too much money for you to refuse because you had recently been divorced from your wife for your debts and left with a little girl for which to care. And now you thrive with her like the weed you are. She doesn't know what her daddy does for a living, don't you, Holly?"

He called the last sentence into the stairwell. A little girl, no older than eleven, tiptoed out of the hallway and onto the roof. Her dark brown hair curled in pretty ringlets against her shoulders and her eyes, child's eyes, were wide. She reached out, took Sherlock's hand, and tugged on it. "Uncle Sherlock? What's Daddy doing?"

Sherlock didn't answer. He brought his eyes to Oleander's once more and waited for the horror, the despair. He waited for the man to realize what he must do.

On Molly's arms Oleander's hands shook with fear. Without hesitation he reached inside his coat and put his gun on the ground, then kicked it to one of his men. He let Molly go. "All of you, leave. Take Holly with you."

One by one the men filtered through the stairway. The last one extricated Holly's hand from Sherlock's and lifted her in his arms before he left.

Oleander drew in a shuddering breath as Sherlock drew closer, step by step. "How did you find her?"

"Research. Did you think I wasn't keeping tabs on you and your men since I put Hemlock away? I knew you would retaliate eventually. I didn't expect you to be so stupid about it. I waited for her this morning when she went outside. She's quite trusting, did you know, to think I was her uncle? I told her I was taking her to see her daddy." Sherlock snorted.

"She was so excited to see her _dear father_," he sneered, punctuating the last two words mordaciously, "That she jumped to follow me. Really, you should teach her better."

Molly looked horrified that Sherlock had stooped to kidnapping. She covered her mouth with her hands and stared at him with astounded eyes. He scowled at her. "What? She's fine. I didn't hurt her. She had milk and cookies and a teddy bear. Stop looking at me like that."

Oleander reached for a gun inside his coat and stopped abruptly, having forgotten that he had discarded it. Sherlock reached for his own gun, looking at it curiously in his hand. "I don't like people knowing about my existence," he said, slowly, "But it would be a shame to kill you and leave sweet Holly without a father. And it would be a chore to hunt down every last man in your gang. So I'll make this very clear: you will leave me alone in exchange for Holly's safety, because if you don't, well, lots of things can be poisoned, can't they? As I'm sure you know."

He would never, of course, have hurt the girl. He would have killed every last man in Oleander's service instead of harming his daughter. But Oleander didn't seem to understand what to do under such a threat, so he reacted in that very irrational way by which Sherlock had always been astounded.

His eyes widened in fear; his body shook. He gave an incoherent roar, reached out, and took Molly by the shoulders once more. Thinking that it would save his daughter, he lifted Molly off her feet, tripped to the edge of the building, and pushed her out into thin air before Sherlock, shouting her name, could reach her.

Molly disappeared, falling and screaming. There was no way, Sherlock knew, to save her. He closed his eyes; he blinked, and in the split-second darkness he saw the calculations of her death.

_A woman falls from rest off a ten meter building. v(squared)__=v(initial)__+2(9.8)(10); v(squared)__= 196; She hits the ground with a speed of 14 meters per second and dies on impact_. _She hits the ground in 1.42 seconds._

Sherlock opened his eyes and Molly's scream was cut short a second later. His eyes snapped to Oleander with all the focus of a marksman on his target.

"And you think that will save you?" snarled Sherlock, advancing. He grabbed Oleander by the collar and, before the other man could lay a hand on him, hit him over the head with the butt of his gun, too furious to stop and think of a creative way to kill him. For his daughter's sake, the man's body shouldn't be too messy when they found it somewhere dark and cockroach infested the next day.

He dropped Oleander's now limp body to the cement floor and gave a shudder.

"Molly," murmured Sherlock to himself, and raced down the stairs.


	8. Still

Sherlock swung himself around the corner of the rundown brick building so fast that he skidded on a puddle waiting for him on the other side. He managed to right himself, ignoring the stinging pain in his wrists as he caught himself just before he collided with the asphalt. His breath came fast, turning to vapor in the lifeless air before him. Stinging pain, lances of the brusque gray air, pierced his lungs and heart with every sharp breath he took as he raced around the building to where Molly had fallen. He knew what he would find, exactly how he would find it: he had seen her death played over and over his mind as he had flown down the stairs with her name on his lips. He knew every minutiae of every physics calculation; he knew how her body would be twisted, what bones would be broken and which ones fractured. He knew the equations of pressure and velocity that would determine the size of the puddle of cherry-red blood pooling beneath her head. And he knew what her eyes would look like, glazed over in death and terror, a frozen picture of despair.

But when he rounded the final corner, made the last turn before he saw her crumpled body before him, he stopped short, so fast that the jolt hurt his knees. There was no body; there was no Molly. There was a dumpster at the foot of the building, big and square and probably filled with pillow-like garbage bags—but he knew better. Sherlock shook himself, cursing sentiment, cursing feelings, cursing love. Love could not twist the laws of physics: she would still have fallen at the same rate, still hit the trash with the same speed. Unless something had changed her velocity mid-fall, she was most likely still dead. Even if she had landed safely, what if she hit a broken mirror, some sort of deadly object people had deliberately thrown away, a knife, a shard of glass?

Step by step he hauled himself to her, hearing her voice in his head, the sweet, birdlike cheeriness that had always sung in her words. He feared that would not hear it again.

Molly knew well enough from her training that she probably shouldn't move. There was a shooting pain in her right leg and her left foot that warned her not to make the slightest attempt at getting out of the dumpster, no matter how bad it smelled. No matter how close that gigantic cockroach was getting to her leg.

Closing her eyes, she waited. She waited, and tried very hard to ignore the pain. Each second it washed over her afresh, like someone was methodically tapping her broken bones with a hammer.

And then a voice, shredded and strained, spoke above her. "Molly," said Sherlock, and then a sigh, a hitch in his breath, and, "Molly!"

He could see the rise and fall of her chest as she waited for help. Her eyes flew open and found his face immediately, as they always did, as they had when she had first seen him in her morgue.

"Sherlock?" she said, even as he took her hand his and hooked his other arm around her shoulders, pulling her up into a sitting position without lifting her, knowing that she was injured. His thumb ran over the back of her hand, leaving a trail of fire against her already burning skin. He turned her hand over in his, dropping his gray-blue eyes to her fingers, examining them one by one. He caught sight of the blood at her fingertips, fresh from the raw wounds she had garnered by trying to slow her fall as she clawed at a passing windowsill on her way down.

He glanced up, then back at her, and dropped her hand only to pull her into an awkward, half embrace. She felt him shake with the words he couldn't voice, with the sentiment he couldn't share. But she felt it in the warmth of his arms and the touch of his hands, warm as they had never been before. She felt it in the lightest brush of his lips on her cheek and on each eyelid, tender and gentle, and she heard it in the words of comfort that he whispered in her ear.

When she came home from the hospital, her broken bones set and her scrapes cleaned, she found him in the same chair he always sat in, although this time the telly was off and he seemed poised, tensed, waiting for her return. When she entered he stood up slowly, tugged on his jacket, and pulled her forward until she was settled on the couch with him. His hand was slow to leave hers.

"We're not safe yet, are we?" she murmured. "There's still people out there, selling—"

"Not people," he corrected quickly. "A person. A single person, with a name. Speaking of which," He paused, knelt, and reached under the couch for the handgun that she'd known he'd been hiding but had never found no matter how hard she had searched for it. "I have some hunting to do. Don't wait up for me, Molly, and don't look at me like that; you know how I feel about that face."

And so to change "that face", as he called it, he bent, tipped her chin up with one long-fingered hand, and kissed her until "that face" had melted into something entirely different.

"Good night, Molly!" called Sherlock from the doorway, and was gone.

**And there you have it! The end! I hope you liked it. If you liked my style and want another story, or have a suggestion for one, or some sort of request for a story you'd like to read, please, please, please, ****_please_**** message me. I love writing and all the great reviews I've received have really just made my day over and over, so I'd be happy to write another fanfiction! Have a wonderful day!**


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